to things, because things, though different from, are the same
as, thoughts, and have the categories of thoughts; in the second
place, the Fichtian Ego of mankind is not the Absolute Reason
of God, and yet is the same Absolute Reason; in the third place,
the Schellingian Nature is the “other” of Spirit, and yet, being a
mere reflex of the Idea of Nature, is identical with Spirit; and as
this Spirit is everywhere the same in God and men, Nature is
also identical with our Spirit, or rather with the Infinite Spirit,
or Absolute Reason, which alone exists. The crux of all metaphysical
idealism is the difficulty of reconciling the unity of
the object with the plurality of subjects. Hegel’s assumption
of identity in difference at once enabled him to deal with the
whole difficulty by holding that different subjects are yet one
subject, and any one object, e.g. the sun, is at once different
from, and identical with, the one subject which is also many.
By the rough magic of this modern Prospero the universe of
being is not, and yet is, thought, idea, spirit, reason, God. So
elastic a solution established a dominant Hegelian school, which
is now practically extinct, in Germany, and from Germany
spread Hegelianism to France, England, America, and, in fact,
diffused it over the civilized world to such an extent that it is
still a widespread fashion outside Germany to believe that the
world of being is a world of thought.
The plain answer is to contest the whole assumption. Different things, however similar, have only similar attributes, and therefore are never the same. God created man in His own image, and the world in the image of the Divine Idea; but I am not God, and the transitory sun is not the same as God’s eternal idea of it. The creatures, however like, Criticism of Panlogism. are not the same as the Creator and His thoughts. Each is a distinct thing, as Aristotle said. Reality is not Reason. It is strange that the underlying assumption of panlogism was not at once contested in this plain way. Nevertheless, objection was soon taken to the unsatisfactoriness of the system reared upon it. Schelling himself, as soon as he saw his own formulae exposed in the logic or rather dialectic of his disciple, began to reconsider his philosophy of identity, and brought some powerful objections against both the conclusions and the method of Hegel. Schelling perceived that Hegel, in reducing everything to infinite mind, absorbed man’s free but finite personality in God, and, in declaring that everything real is rational, failed to explain evil and sin: indeed, the English reader of T. H. Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics can see how awkward is the Hegelian transition from “one spiritual principle” to different men’s individual freedom of choice between good and evil. Again, Schelling urged that besides the rational element there must be something else; that there is in nature, as natura naturans, a blind impulse, a will without intelligence, which belongs to the existent; and that even God Himself as the Absolute cannot be pure thought, because in order to think He must have an existence which cannot be merely His thought of it, and therefore pure being is the prior condition of thought and spirit. Hence Schelling objected to the Hegelian dialectic on the ground that, although reason by itself can apprehend notions or essences, and even that of God, it cannot deduce a priori the existence either of God or of Nature, for the apprehension of which experience is required. He now distinguished two philosophies: negative philosophy starting from notions, and positive philosophy starting from being; the former a philosophy of conditions, the latter of causes, i.e. of existence. Hegel, he said, had only supplied the logic of negative philosophy; and it must be confessed that the most which could be extracted from the Hegelian dialectic would be some connexion of thoughts without proving any existence of corresponding things. Schelling was right; but he had too much affinity with Hegelian assumptions, e.g. the panlogistic confusion of the essences of things with the notions of reason, to construct a positive philosophy without falling into fresh mysticism, which failed to exorcise the effect of his earlier philosophy of identity in the growing materialism of the age.
2. Meanwhile, by the side of panlogism arose the panthelism of Schopenhauer (1788–1860). This new noumenal idealism began, like the preceding, by combining psychological idealism with the transcendentalism of Kant and Fichte. In Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung Schopenhauer accepted Kant’s position that the world as Schopen-hauer. phenomenal is idea (Vorstellung); but he added that the world as noumenal is will (Wille). He got the hint of a noumenal will from Kant; but in regarding the noumenal as knowable, because mental, as well as in the emphasis he laid on the activity of will, he resembled Fichte. His theory of the nature of will was his own, and arrived at from a voluntaristic psychology leading to a voluntaristic metaphysics of his own. His psychological starting-point was the unproved assumption that the only force of which we are immediately aware is will; his metaphysical goal was the consistent conclusion that in that case the only force we can know, as the noumenal essence of which all else is phenomenal appearance, is will. But by this noumenal will he did not mean a divine will similar to our rational desire, a will in which an inference and desire of a desirable end and means produces our rational action. He meant an unintelligent, unconscious, restless, endless will. In considering the force of instinct in animals he was obliged to divest will of reason. When he found himself confronted with the blind forces of Nature he was obliged to divest irrational will of feeling. As he resolved one force after another into lower and lower grades of will he was obliged to divest will of all consciousness. In short, his metaphysics was founded on a misnomer, and simply consisted in calling unconscious force by the name of unconscious will (Unbewusster Wille). This abuse of language brought him back to Leibnitz. But, whereas Leibnitz imputed unconscious perception as well as unconscious appetition to monads, Schopenhauer supposed unconscious will to arise without perception, without feeling, without ideas, and to be the cause of ideas only in us. Hence he rejected the infinite intelligence supposed by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel against whom he urged that blind will produces intelligence, and only becomes conscious in us by using intelligence as a means to ends. He also rejected the optimism of Leibnitz and Hegel, and placed the most irrational of wills at the base of the worst possible of worlds (see further Schopenhauer). This pessimistic panthelism gradually won its way, and procured exponents such as J. Frauenstädt, J. Bahnsen, and, more recently, P. Deussen. The accident of its pessimism attracted F. W. Nietzsche, who afterwards, passing from the philosophy of will to the theory of evolution, ended by imagining that the struggle of the will to live produces the survival of the fittest, that is, the right of the strongest and the will to exercise power, which by means of selection may hereafter issue in a new species of superior man—the Uebermensch. Finally, Schopenhauer’s voluntarism has had a profound effect on psychology inside and outside Germany, and to a less degree produced attempts to deduce from voluntaristic psychology new systems of voluntaristic metaphysics, such as those of Paulsen and Wundt.
3. The first to modify the pure voluntarism of Schopenhauer was E. von Hartmann, who (Die Philosophie des Unbewussten, 1869, 1st ed.), advanced the view that the world as noumenal is both unconscious intelligence and unconscious will, thus founding a panpneumatism which forms a sort of reconciliation of the panlogism of Hegel and the panthelism Hartmann. of Schopenhauer. In his tract entitled Schelling’s positive Philosophie als Einheit von Hegel und Schopenhauer (1869) he further showed that, in his later philosophy, Schelling had already combined reason and will in the Absolute. Indeed, Fichte had previously characterized the life of the Absolute by reason and will without consciousness; and, before Fichte, Leibnitz had asserted that the elements of Nature are monads with unconscious perception and appetition. Hartmann has an affinity with all these predecessors, and with Spinoza, with whom he agrees that there is but one substance unaltered by the plurality of individuals which are only its modifications. Following, however, in the footsteps of Schelling, he idealizes the one extended and thinking substance into one mental being; but he thinks that its essence consists in unconscious intelligence and will, of which all individual intelligent wills are only activities. The merit of this fresh noumenal idealism consists in its correction of the one-sidedness of Schopenhauer: intelligence is necessary to will. But Hartmann’s criticism does not go far enough. He ends by outdoing the paradox of Schopenhauer, concluding that Nature in itself is intelligent will, but unconscious, a sort of immanent unconscious God.
As with his master, his reasons for this view are derived, not from a direct proof that unconscious Nature has the mental attributes supposed, but from human psychology and epistemology. Like
Leibnitz, he proceeds from the fact that our perceptions are